Radek Kacmarsky works on a drawing during free time in his third-grade class on the first day back at Bay Head School since superstorm Sandy hit. / PETER ACKERMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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BAY HEAD — It’s customary at Bay Head School to reference a significant historical event during the morning announcements.

Thursday was no different.

“On this date in history,” Principal Walter Therien intoned over the public address system, “the students at Bay Head School returned to Bay Head School!”

Cheers erupted in every classroom, celebrating the end of a 45-day odyssey for the K-8 public school and its nearly 150 students and 15 staff members. Six weeks after superstorm Sandy, they finally made it back to their quaint, red brick building on Grove Street, after spending the past month at the G. Harold Antrim Elementary School in neighboring Point Pleasant Beach.

Little else has returned to normal in this hushed community, home to fewer than 1,000 year-round residents. National Guard troops still restrict access into town, and many homes remain uninhabitable. The borough has condemned 57 homes, mostly on the beachfront along East Avenue.

The school wasn’t spared. The storm surge from nearby Barnegat Bay seeped through the gymnasium windows, filling the lower half of the 112-year-old building with cold, brackish water that destroyed several classrooms and the nurse’s office, wiped out the electrical system and damaged the gym, which doubles as the cafeteria.

Contractors correctly estimated it would be three to five weeks before the school could reopen. In need of a temporary home, school officials turned to the Antrim school, which freed up its library, art and music rooms so the Bay Head students could remain with their classes and their regular teachers.

“They basically took the whole school and plopped it into Antrim,” said Maggie Ranucci, of Bay Head, whose son, Robert Dey, 7, bolted from her car the moment the doors of his school opened Thursday, as if an early Christmas present were waiting for him inside his second-grade classroom.

Owing to Bay Head’s small year-round population and the solid academic reputation of its lone public school, fully half of the student body is from outside of town. Tuition for non-residents is $4,500 per year.

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As they pass the yellowed photographs hanging in the stairwell showing graduating classes as far back as the 1930s, today’s students may well wonder what life was like for earlier generations at Bay Head School.

It’s a safe bet that none were ever uprooted by such a powerful storm for quite so long.

A dozen or more school families still haven’t returned to their homes, Therien said. Among them are the MacPhersons and Laymons, who have been living together in their friends’ summer home in Point Pleasant Beach since the storm.

“We’re going to be out for like three or four months,” said Kenny MacPherson, 12.

“It’s a little annoying, because I’m the only girl,” added his sister, Jane, 9.

Returning to their school marks one more step toward normalcy, even if they do have to eat lunch and have gym in their classrooms, while an estimated $100,000 in renovation work continues downstairs. John A. Ravally, the superintendent for both the Bay Head and Point Pleasant Beach school districts, said temporary trailers will alleviate some of the space crunch, and an outpouring of donations have helped offset the loss of supplies.

Teachers and parents said students have shown remarkable resilience amid all this upheaval. But it hasn’t been easy.

David Lewis, a third-grade teacher, said his students clung to each other at Antrim, even though they knew a lot of the Antrim kids from sports teams and other activities.

“We were telling them, ‘Meet new people, interact,’ but they kind of just hung out with each other,” he said.

Ann Marie Wisliceny and Carrie Meyer, who jointly teach the third- and fourth-grades, had students write or draw every day in an “Antrim Adventure Journal.”

“It was our way of having them express their feelings — about everything,” Wisliceny said. “It gave us a good idea of where they were emotionally.”

Relocated to the Antrim library, the teachers hit on the idea of having one of them read aloud for a few minutes every morning while the other set up their makeshift classroom. It occurred to them that third- and fourth-graders might be too old for a daily story time, but it turned out they looked forward to it, Wisliceny said. She thinks it comforted them.

In fact, the children enjoyed it so much, they asked if they could be read to once they returned to their own school.

And so, on their first day back, Meyer opened up Louis Sachar’s “There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom,” and began to read. Her storm-tested students clustered tightly around her, quietly rapt — and obviously content to be back in their other home, at last.